


the deed took all my heart

by iphigenias



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, Jack being Jack, Magical Realism, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 10:58:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16094279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iphigenias/pseuds/iphigenias
Summary: Jack manifests the morning of his sixteenth birthday. He falls asleep, fifteen years eleven months and twenty-nine days old, and wakes up, sixteen, with a branch from the maple tree outside his bedroom window curling into the room like a hand reaching out to hold him. Jack sits up. Gets out of bed. Walks over to the maple branch and lifts his hand to brush it through the red leaves; they crinkle and sigh at his touch.Jack, they say.Jack.





	the deed took all my heart

**Author's Note:**

> long story short i fell out of the check please fandom for about a year, heard about it being published (!!!!!!!!), immediately reread through the entire comic and went on a fanfic binge, then wrote this in a haze when i really should be doing uni work so! go team!
> 
> warnings for (and there's a lot): depression, anxiety, non-graphic suicide attempt, non-graphic suicidal thoughts, the crushing weight of parental expectations, parse being a piece of shit, the liberal use of trees as a metaphor for jack's feelings, jack having a LOT of feelings, shitty surprisingly not exhibiting any questionable fashion choices and/or nudity. colour me shocked
> 
> title from mary oliver's poem 'the return'

Jack manifests the morning of his sixteenth birthday—a perfectly respectable, perfectly average moment in the timeline of his life. He falls asleep, fifteen years eleven months and twenty-nine days old, and wakes up, sixteen, with a branch from the maple tree outside his bedroom window curling into the room like a hand reaching out to hold him. Jack sits up. Gets out of bed. Walks over to the maple branch and lifts his hand to brush it through the red leaves; they crinkle and sigh at his touch. _Jack_ , they say. _Jack_.

His _maman_ finds him like that, twenty minutes later, enveloped in maple leaves like a throw rug over his shoulders. She clasps her hands to her mouth and sighs happily. “Oh, Jack,” she says, stepping into the room and making her way to her son, the maple branches parting for her like the tide. “I’m so proud of you.”

Bad Bob follows Alicia into the room and surveys the damage. “Guess you were always Mama’s little boy, huh?” he says resignedly, leaning against the doorframe. Jack shrugs in apology, but can’t keep the smile from his face.

*

No-one knows why, or exactly how it happens. There’s no genetic factor involved, despite the common belief. All anyone knows for sure is, at some point during adolescence, your powers manifest. Though perhaps _power_ is the wrong word—many people call it a gift. The gift of light. Of earth. Of water. Of the trees. The list goes on, but it’s not limitless. It’s always something to do with nature, no matter how small—whether the touch of a hand can make the morning dew drops sparkle, or the desire to stay dry will repel every raindrop from touching you in a storm.

Jack’s father has the gift of ice. Unsurprising, really. A lot of professional hockey players do. Not that powers of any kind are permitted in a game—but it’s still an advantage. The players know the ice, and the ice knows them. Jack had been expecting to manifest his father’s gift, one step closer to coming out on top of the draft. This is undoubtedly a setback. He’ll have to work twice as hard to beat the players who feel the ice in their bones like marrow.

But—and Jack will never tell anyone this, _especially_ not his father—Jack had hoped for a different gift. A warmer gift. Jack loves the sun; the way the leaves of the maple tree outside his bedroom window capture and refract its light, dripping illusions of gold across his face as he lay beneath its creaking boughs. Waking up at sixteen, with those same boughs creeping into his room, welcoming him, reaching out for him, defining him, for the rest of his life, out from the shadow of his father—it had felt like a dream, just for a moment, where everything was perfect. Where hockey didn’t exist for a single, shining second. Where Jack could feel the warmth of the sun through the maple leaves and not feel like his life was being lived without him.

Only for a second, though. The real world comes crashing back in soon enough.

*

Bad Bob pushes himself off from the doorframe and dusts away a stray maple leaf that had settled on his shoulder. “Come downstairs when you’re done mucking about,” he says. “We should get in some drills before practice.” He turns his back on his son and walks away.

Alicia loops an arm around Jack’s shoulders. He’s already taller than her by half a head—if she tilts her head to the side and squints, she can almost see the man her son is well on his way to becoming. “Just give him some time,” she promises, giving Jack’s shoulders a shake. “He loves you. Just give him time.”

Jack shrugs away from her grip and tries to look happy, but the smile has slipped from his face and he’s not sure if he can get it back.

*

Jack doesn’t tell Kent.

*

Kent manifests seven months later. Ice. He tells Jack at practice the next day, brimming with excitement and pride.

*

Jack doesn’t tell Kent.

*

Kent kisses like he talks: fast, passionate, sloppy. They are eighteen and the draft is barely two months away. Jack slips his hands beneath Kent’s shirt; feels his skin, sweaty and burning, beneath the palms of his hands.

“Can’t you cool down or something?” Jack manages to pant out as Kent drags a line of kisses down his jugular. Kent pulls back for a second and wiggles his eyebrows. The tips of his fingers turn a soft blue—when he presses them against Jack’s bare abdomen, the ice cold feel of them makes him jump.

“ _Fucker_ ,” Jack hisses out in French, and Kent laughs.

“You’re just jealous because you’re a late bloomer,” he says into Jack’s ear before kissing the skin just below it. He moves his cold hand from Jack’s stomach to his waist; catches his fingers on Jack’s belt buckle. “You can pay me back later. Yes or no?” he asks, voice incongruously soft. Jack swallows down the lie of his gift and nods.

“Yes,” he says. Kent drops to his knees and helps Jack forget.

*

Jack tells Kent three weeks later. “Zimms, that’s…” Kent trails off. He looks aghast. Jack has never seen anyone look aghast before, but he imagines this is what it looks like. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I knew you’d react like this,” Jack says, tracking the movement of Kent’s Adam’s apple as he swallows. “It doesn’t change anything.”

“Are you joking?” Kent throws his hands into the air and laughs, a soft, wrecked sound. “It changes everything, Jack.”

“Even—” _Us_ , Jack doesn’t say. Kent looks away.

“Everything,” he says again. Jack looks at the maple leaf in his hand. They’re sitting beneath the boughs of the tree in Jack’s backyard. He’d thought it made sense to tell Kent here.

Away from the ice.

“I need to think about this,” Kent says, getting to his feet. “I’m sorry.” He turns his back on Jack and walks away.

The maple leaf crumbles to dust in Jack’s clenched fist.

*

He doesn’t mean to OD.

That’s what he tells people when they ask.

That’s what he tells himself.

The thing is,

 

he’s always been good at lying.

*

There’s a tree outside his room in rehab. A poplar. Jack asks the nurse to leave his window open and at night he coaxes the branches through until they fill the far side of the room. He can’t quite get them to cover the door, but he pretends they do. Imagines he’s inside his very own cocoon, waiting to emerge as someone new. Someone better. It only works sometimes. The real world lurks just outside the door.

*

Samwell is a green campus. When it comes down to it, that’s the reason why Jack chooses it. Every human being requires photosynthesis to transform their carbon dioxide into oxygen, but Jack—Jack needs the trees to _live_. He doesn’t know any other way to explain it.

He joins the hockey team. How could he not? Most of the guys are nice, either stoned or non-judgemental or tactful enough to stay away from the topic of the draft. There are a couple shitheads, but nothing Jack can’t handle.

He makes a friend his first week there. “Shitty B. Knight,” the boy with too-long hair and a friendly, open grin says to Jack the day they meet. “And you’re Jack, right? I think you were in my Gender Politics in War class yesterday.”

Jack doesn’t have to force a smile when he shakes Shitty’s hand. “That’s me,” he says, glowing and pleased to be recognised for something other than his last name and wreck of a legacy. “Is Shitty short for something?”

“Yes,” Shitty replies. “But I swore to myself on my fifteenth birthday I would never tell anyone what it is unless the fate of the world or maybe a small, fluffy dog depended on it.”

Jack blinks. “That’s specific.”

“What can I say?” Shitty says. “I live for the details.”

Jack smiles. Thinks of the veins of a freshly fallen sugar maple leaf; the ridged contours of its outer edge. “Me too,” he says.

And just like that, they’re friends.

The topic of their gifts doesn’t even come up until about a month later. “Brah,” Shitty says, dropping down on the grass next to Jack where he’s sprawled out beneath his favourite tree on campus. “You are like, a gravitational _pull_ on this tree.”

“What?” Jack asks. He twists around to lay on his back. Sure enough, the branches above him curve down like parentheses towards his body; he hadn’t even realised he was calling them. Jack relaxes with a quiet sigh and the branches bend back up to embrace the sky. He looks sheepishly at Shitty.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sometimes I do it without noticing.”

“No worries, man.” Shitty flips open his textbook and starts to read. Jack can’t help but glance over at him.

“So what…” He trails off; tries again. “What can you do?”

Shitty looks at him with a grin. “Nothing quite that dramatic. I’m more of a flower kind of guy.” He opens the palm of his hand to reveal a perfectly shaped rose cradled inside. “Lame, I know. But handy around Valentine’s Day, so if you ever need someone to hook you up with a sweet bouquet…” He raises his eyebrows conspiratorially and Jack can’t help but laugh.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, nudging Shitty’s shoulder, who nudges him back, and Jack can’t remember the last time he was this happy. Maybe never.

The thought is a stone cold weight in his chest.

*

Shitty somehow manages to worm his way into every facet of Jack’s existence. He’s in his classes; on the hockey team; hooks them up for a sweet shared bathroom dibs in the Haus next year. Jack’s never had a friend like Shitty before. Not even Kent, _especially_ not Kent, who was both less and more than Shitty is—but mostly less.

They haven’t even spoken since the draft.

But Shitty somehow gets it. Gets Jack. Gets his weird study habits and his obsessive hockey practice. Gets his love of History Channel documentaries, Dolly Parton’s early albums, and the end pieces of Annie’s orange and poppy seed syrup cake where the sweetness always settles.

Shitty gets the panic attacks, too. Jack didn’t mean for him to find out about them but, well. They’re hard to hide when they’re happening.

The day after Shitty sits with him through one, Jack tells him everything. About the draft. About the overdose. His manifestation, his father’s expectations, his own disappointments. About Kent. It’s hard, but not as hard as Jack thought it would be. Shitty’s a good listener, and when Jack’s done, he sits with the information for a moment before opening his palm and holding out a rose to Jack. “I love you, brah,” he says solemnly, and there’s no joking in his tone. “And I’m here for you no matter what.”

Jack takes the rose, and cries, and Shitty holds him through it all.

*

When Jack arrives home in the break between his freshman and sophomore years, Alicia cries at the airport in front of everyone.

“ _Maman_ …” Jack says, slightly embarrassed as they wait for his luggage. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

“I know, honey, I know,” Alicia sobs. “That’s why I’m crying.”

Jack can’t get her to explain further so instead he hustles her to the car as soon as his suitcase trundles along the conveyer belt. He takes the keys from her, gently, and makes sure she’s buckled in before pulling out of the parking lot.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry,” she says halfway through the drive. “You must be so tired from the flight and here I am making you drive us home too.”

“You’re not making me do anything, _maman_ ,” Jack says. “I’m happy to do it.”

 _Happy_ , Alicia mouths to herself. The word tastes like a dream.

The house is empty when they get home. “Your father must have gone to Stu’s,” Alicia says apologetically. Jack shrugs and hides his disappointment. Not everything can change all at once. He takes his suitcase up to his old room and sits down on the freshly made bed. It smells like the lavender laundry powder his _maman_ uses; soft and familiar. He stands and walks over to the window, pushing it open as high as it will go and leaning out. At his will, the maple tree extends a gentle and loving branch towards him; its leaves run up his arm and around the back of his neck, a familiar embrace Jack missed down in Massachusetts. He breathes in; breathes out. The maple sighs in the wind. Alicia clatters away in the kitchen downstairs; the sound drifts out of the open kitchen window into Jack’s own. It feels as though he never left, and for a moment, Jack imagines it. Eighteen again; the draft so close and top pick within reach; Kent’s lips against his, hot and demanding; the satisfying slide of his skates against the iced over pond down the road. They could’ve been signed together, him and Kent. Jack had been holding out for the Habs, but really any good team would do. And any team with Kent on it would become a good team regardless if it had been one before. They could’ve been unstoppable. Once upon a time, they were.

Jack opens his eyes; he hadn’t even realised he closed them. The dream shatters like glass. Kent hasn’t spoken to him in over a year. Neither has his father, not really. Not in the way they used to talk.

Jack wonders if it’s their gift that makes them so cold, or if being cold is the reason they got their gift in the first place. Neither would surprise him.

*

Jack kisses Shitty two months into their sophomore year. He would blame it on the tub juice, but neither of them are drunk; he would blame it on the weed, but neither of them are high. How it happens is this:

Haus kegster. Shitty camped out on the front lawn in a deck chair for some unknowable reason, uncharacteristically sober. Jack’s phone, locked and on silent, its notifications an anchor around his gut.

MISSED CALL                                  28m ago  
**Kent Parson**

MISSED CALL                                  23m ago  
**Kent Parson**

MESSAGES                                       20m ago  
**Kent Parson  
** > can we talk?

MESSAGES                                       17m ago  
**Kent Parson  
** > jack…

MISSED CALL                                  15m ago  
**Kent Parson**

MISSED CALL                                  10m ago  
**Kent Parson**

MESSAGES                                       9m ago  
**Kent Parson  
** > pick up your fucking phone

MESSAGES                                       4m ago  
**Kent Parson  
** > you win zimmermann. have a nice life

Jack is in the Haus kitchen when the first call comes through. As soon as he sees who it is he feels the desperate, feverish need to throw up. He remembers, absurdly, programming Kent’s number into his phone so many years ago. “How many Kents do you know, dude?” he had laughed. “ _Why_ did you put me under my last name too?”

“That’s just how I like to have my contacts,” Jack had replied.

“Okay, weirdo,” Kent had said, giving Jack a shove and grinning. “Now come on, show me that drill you were telling me about?”

Somehow, Jack makes his way to his bedroom. Shuts the door behind him. Takes a few long, deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, until the urge to vomit passes. There are four more notifications from Kent. As he stares at his phone, it lights up again with another call. Jack lets it ring through until the screen blacks out again. **pick up your fucking phone** is the next message. Jack waits. Sits down on the bed, so he has something soft to pass out on if it comes to that. Closes his eyes and breathes, long and deep, again, and again.

His phone buzzes. The final words swim before his eyes and suddenly he can’t be here anymore. The tree outside his bedroom is trying to reach in through the closed window but Jack knows, Jack _knows_ that won’t be enough. He needs to be outside. He needs fresh air, he needs—

“Sup, brah?” Shitty greets him with when he bursts out the front door of the Haus. When he takes a proper look at Jack, he pushes himself upright in his chair and nudges his sunglasses to the top of his head. “Jack. _Jack_ , buddy.” Distantly, Jack registers Shitty standing, walking over to him, taking him gently by the elbows and holding him there, softly. “Are you okay?”

Jack isn’t drunk, and he isn’t high. But he sways forward and presses his lips against Shitty’s all the same.

They are both perfectly still for the length of two heartbeats. Shitty pulls back first, the look on his face both confused and careful. “C’mon Jack,” he says, guiding Jack to the deck chair on the lawn. “Why don’t you sit down?”

Jack does. Shitty kneels in the grass beside him. “So,” he says. Jack looks down at his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he says in a rush, the words tumbling out of their own volition. “I didn’t mean—I would never—you’re my _friend_ , Shitty, and I—”

“Hey, hey.” Shitty grabs Jack’s hands from where they’re clenched into fists and smooths them out flat. There are crescent shaped divots in Jack’s palm from his fingernails. “None of that, okay? No take-backs.”

Jack cracks a half-hearted smile at that. “What are you, twelve?”

“If twelve-year-old me had known I was gonna kiss a hot piece of ass like you one day?” Shitty makes a _mind-blown_ gesture. “But seriously… I know you don’t like me like that, dude. So not that it wasn’t nice but like… why?”

Wordlessly, Jack digs his phone out from his pocket. Hands it over to Shitty, who presses the home button and scrolls through the notifications with an exponentially worsening pissed-off expression.

“That. Piece. Of. Shit,” Shitty says, enunciating each word perfectly. “Seriously. This is, what—the first time he’s contacted you in like two years?” Jack nods. “Garbage. Absolute _trash_. I am blocking every single Aces player on social media right _now_.”

Incredibly, Jack laughs. There is something just so incredibly _bizarre_ about this entire situation, and he can’t help it. Shitty lets him go until his stomach starts to hurt, and then places a warm hand on Jack’s shoulder.

“Kent’s place in your life is over,” he says seriously. “And I will never, ever be like him. And you never, ever have to talk to him again if that’s what you want. Jack.” Shitty gives his shoulder a shake. “You have to do what makes you happy. And Kent is not one of those things.”

“I know,” Jack says, and the thing is, he does. Has known it ever since that afternoon beneath his family’s maple tree— _It changes everything_ , Kent had said. And it did. Jack just didn’t realise that was a good thing until now. He hands Shitty back his phone. “Can you block his number for me? I don’t know how.”

Shitty grins, takes the phone, and does just that. As he works, Jack tilts his head up towards the sky, lit up by the stars and buzzing fluorescent street lamps. He feels—unbound. Limitless. Kent Parson is three thousand miles away in Las Vegas and no longer a part of Jack’s life and that’s okay, that’s okay, that’s good, even. A tree has never needed another tree to help it stand; its own roots, buried deep and strong and enduring beneath the earth, are enough. Jack is enough without Kent.

Jack is enough.

*

Time marches on. Jack gets a C on a history exam. He misses a winning shot in their game against Yale. His dad still won’t look him in the eye. The bottle of anxiety meds in the bathroom cabinet seems to taunt him; seems to say _you know there’s another way out_.

Jack shuts the cabinet door. He sets his alarm for five A.M. every day, downs a protein shake and is lacing on his skates by 5:15. He takes the exam to his professor, asks her to show him where he went wrong. Explains his extracirriculars, and gets an extension on the next assignment. Calls his _maman_ at the end of every week on his way home from photography class. Texts his father, tentatively, about a new drill he’s thinking of trying out for practice next week. Gets an enthusiastic call back, and for exactly seventeen minutes it feels as though nothing ever went wrong between them.

When Jack’s not at the Haus or in class or at Faber, he’s outside. Most often under his favourite tree where he and Shitty first shared their gifts. The branches still curve towards him more often than not, but he’s gotten better at noticing. Sometimes he even manages to get them to stay upright the entire time he’s studying beneath the boughs—but only sometimes.

Shitty joins him on occasion, and a few times he brings along a girl named Lardo. Then Lardo starts to come on her own, and Jack makes another friend, just like that.

It feels, somehow, like growth.

*

His first day back junior year Jack visits Faber before anywhere else. He hasn’t even dropped his stuff off at the Haus. The rink is empty, will be for the next week or so until the students start trickling in—Jack has arrived early for this exact reason.

He laces on his skates and makes his way to the middle of the rink. Small clouds of white air gust out from his mouth every time he breathes. Slowly, he crouches down, gingerly sits on the ice with his legs splayed out in front of him. He rests his hand against the ice and wonders how this feels for his father. For Kent. For everyone with the ice gift—wonders if having it would make him love hockey more, or less. If it would make him hate it, in the end.

Light trickles in through the high windows surrounding the rink. Jack gets to his feet. He skates off the ice, puts his shoes back on, drops his equipment in the locker room and steps outside into the sunshine, face tilted up toward the sky.

Jack may not have the gift of ice, and that may mean he’ll never be as good a player as his father. As Kent. But in this moment, with the sun like molten gold against his skin, Jack can’t bring himself to care. Ice is, after all, frozen water. It can be melted into a liquid and even dissolved into a gas. It can become nothing, given time. But the trees, and the sun—they are not quite forever, because nothing ever is, and Jack knows that better than most. But they’re close enough. Trees only grow stronger as they age.

Jack is just beginning.


End file.
